Gen. Gregory Guillot, Commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command hosted distinguished visitors at Falcon Peak on Fort Carson, Colorado, Oct. 30, 2024. (U.S. Department of Defense photo by Josh Armstrong)
FORT CARSON, Colo. — When industry representatives gathered with military officials in the Colorado mountains to test different counter-drone tactics, another enemy lurked in the background, threatening to hamstring efforts to take on the increasing threat of small drones: red tape.
In some ways, officials said during the Falcon Peak event, the focus needs to be on figuring out the complex rules and regulations governing domestic airspace, which largely limit options military commanders have to respond to small unmanned aircraft systems, or sUAS.
“The threat, and the need to counter these threats, is growing faster than the policies and procedures that [are] in place can keep up with,” US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) chief Gen. Gregory Guillot told reporters during a visit to the exercises last month.
Working in concert with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), NORTHCOM used Falcon Peak as an opportunity to get smart not only on the nets, streamers and cyberattacks meant to defeat sUAS, but on the regulatory side as well. Guillot, for instance, envisions his command acting as a homeland “synchronizer” to coordinate interagency efforts and distribute defensive capabilities to installations.
“One of the key things about Falcon Peak is it offers not just the opportunity to look at the technology that’s being tested, but also at our processes,” a senior DoD official who attended the demo said in a roundtable with reporters, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
“A lot of the tasks we have in the homeland, it’s a very sophisticated environment in that it’s complicated from a regulatory perspective. It’s a very civilianized environment. It’s not a war zone,” they added.
A Patchwork Of Policies
The DoD already has authority to conduct anti-drone missions on US soil, but the law “restricts our ability to use counter-UAS to certain types of covered rules and missions, covered assets” like nuclear or special operations, the official explained. The statute also requires coordination with the Department of Transportation, mainly through the FAA.
To help address the sUAS problem, the official said the Pentagon has pushed a legislative proposal that would help clarify what facilities are covered under the federal statute that allows DoD to enforce perimeter security. The Pentagon is also seeking changes that would improve interagency counter-UAS coordination, they added.
The official stressed that if needed, the US government writ large has authorities to defend military bases domestically. But the challenge is in ensuring “authorities knit together at the seams so that the whole homeland is protected.”
Any policy changes likely would not be a one-off either, as the official noted drones themselves will change along with the technologies necessary to defeat them. New tech would then need to be coordinated with other domestic agencies to ensure any impacts are fully understood.
“As our counter-UAS abilities grow and change, we have a responsibility to make not just the FAA, but any civilian agency that we think could be adversely affected by the system that we’re fielding aware [of it] and talk to them about how this could affect them,” the official said.
Signal Interference As ‘One Of The Biggest Hurdles’
Heeding domestic protections, traditional tools like guns and missiles were shunned at Falcon Peak in favor of low- and non-kinetic options, such as nets and signal interference. Those tactics appeared to successfully demonstrate a non-intrusive, low-collateral way to bring down an sUAS, but the senior defense official noted that even with seemingly non-threatening techniques like net capture, some kind of wider coordination would be required before it could be approved beyond ad hoc cases.
“And so there is a process, I think, that we need to continue to refine that will determine how we get those approvals and whether that approval can be a blanket approval,” the official said.
Other options like jamming radio frequency links and denying navigation systems required extremely tight coordination with the FAA, as any spillover interference that affected civilian navigation systems could spell danger.
“That is probably one of the biggest hurdles that we have in the counter-UAS space,” Jason Mayes, counter-small unmanned aerial systems deputy test director for NORTHCOM told reporters regarding tools like signal interference. “It is a very, very difficult capability to get permission to utilize.”
NORTHCOM planners had a total of 90 days to plan and execute the Falcon Peak event, Mayes said, requiring a compressed process with the FAA to get the right approvals for the technology. The bureaucracy moved more quickly once the need to use signal interference tech was established as a one-off, “but I think in real time, we would probably be able to do it very quickly,” Mayes said, pointing to Guillot’s envisioned role of NORTHCOM serving as a domestic synchronizer.
“There’s some areas where we’ve got one policy saying one [thing] and another policy saying another. And the parts where they cross over get a little blurry, you know, and just confusing,” Mayes said. “So I think we need to solidify all of that.”
Working with the FAA could one day yield the possibility of approving “kinetic-type” weapons, said another official, though such an agreement might not be reached in the near-term.
“The FAA and other authorities are looking at this capability and understanding the safety mechanisms that we’re implementing into these systems. For example, directed energy: We’re implementing things into the directed energy system where it has significant safety avoidance,” Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, commander of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense command and former director of the Pentagon office tasked with countering small drones, told reporters.
“We can mitigate a lot of the challenges of using kinetic-type of capabilities. So I think, over time, working closely as an enterprise … [and trying] to find out what are the best ways from a reduced risk mitigation, can we get there with some of these kinetic effectors, and what are the right kinetic effectors we actually want to employ,” he added.
